Dear Andrei,
I read with interest your recent posting on the North Arabian
puzzle as part of our discussion on the 6th century crisis. It
struck me that the Persians and Byzantines had each their own
vassal state or dependency in the peninsula, both in the northwest.
This in indicative, isn't it of rivalry between these two great
empires in the Arabian region? Is this rivalry over "spheres" related
to economic/trade control motives, as per the recent exhanges with
Daniel Foss about Rome vs. Persia and the recurrent rivalry over
Syria-Mesopotamia and Armenia, etc. ? I presume you are saying that
the general world economic crisis "levelled" the states and chiefdoms
of the Arabian peninsula in its wake- setting back state forms to
less complex formations? (i.e. a kind of regional "dark Ages" type of
effect on analogy to the conventional understanding of economic,
social, political retrogression in Western Roman provinces?
I await with great interest your promised hypotheses on the
"fundamental causes of the 6th century AD world system crisis" and
the place of Arabia within this context.
Yours,
Dr. Barry Gills
Dept. of Politics
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
UK